


So Lied the Looking Glass

by Chrome



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher Series - Andrzej Sapkowski
Genre: Adventure & Romance, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Magic Mirrors, Mid-Season 1 (Witcher TV), Post-Season of Storms, Shame, gothic horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-07-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:15:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25547302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chrome/pseuds/Chrome
Summary: In an enchanted maze of mirrors, Geralt and Yennefer fight their old worst enemies--themselves.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Comments: 20
Kudos: 47
Collections: Multifandom Horror Exchange (2020)





	So Lied the Looking Glass

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Meilan_Firaga](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meilan_Firaga/gifts).



> For the reader concerned about chronology, this fic makes the assumption that the chronology of the television show is roughly the same as the books. This takes place directly after Geralt's recovery at the Temple of Melitele as detailed in _The Last Wish_ , and references the events of "The Witcher" (adapted as "Betrayer Moon") and _Season of Storms_ , which would take place mid-season one. 
> 
> For the reader interested in which details I made up, almost nothing. All you really need to know is that Yennefer acquired and returned Geralt's swords to him after they were stolen, and Geralt bought gemstones with his reward for saving Adda and gifted them--including "an interesting agate"--to Yennefer.

The woman found Geralt on his way upstairs to his room in the inn. The rain was heavy enough, and the coin in his pocket good enough, that he’d paid for a room. The village itself had no need for a witcher—the story he heard three times that night, with variant details from three different people, was about a sorcerer’s apprentice who went mad and built a maze of mirrors that she lured people into and killed.

The first time, he thought it was a local fairy tale. By the second time, he was pretty sure it was not only true, but recent. “Don’t need a witcher to look into it?” he asked the third man who told it to him.

But he shook his head. “Sorcerer,” he said. “They sent someone from Aretuza to look into it.”

Geralt was privately surprised that it really was a sorcerer. But he thanked the man and finished his drink. He’d had enough of sorcerers. He’d leave them to themselves and look for work elsewhere.

Even if plenty of them were monster enough to qualify for his swords.

He’d set the thought aside as sleepiness crept up on him, and headed up the stairs. The woman was standing on the landing and grabbed his elbow when he tried to pass her.

“Witcher,” she said.

“What,” he barked, a little more aggressively than he meant to. He jerked his arm back. He’d seen her, of course, but the touch had startled him more than he would like to admit.

“You asked if we needed a witcher to look into the sorceress,” she said. “And the maze.”

“Yeah,” Geralt said. “But the Academy sent someone. No need for a lowly witcher to get involved.”

“They sent someone to kill her,” the woman said.

“Hasn’t she been killing people?” Geralt said, raising an eyebrow.

“Well—“ the woman said. “They haven’t—come back, but…”

“Yeah,” Geralt said. “Okay.” He pulled his arm further back to completely avoid her, and headed up the stairs.

“Please,” she said.

“Here’s my advice,” Geralt said. “Don’t mess with sorcerers. Never ends well.”

“She’s my daughter,” the woman said. “Please. I’ll—let me explain.”

Geralt sighed. “Fine.”

“I live down the street,” she began.

“We’ll talk in my room,” said Geralt. He wasn’t about to wander off with the mother of a sorceress, even if she looked like he could snap her in half. At least in an inn there were other people who might come at the sound of shouting, and he knew where he’d land if he had to leap from the window.

“Well…” she hesitated.

“If you’re worried about being in a room alone with me, you shouldn’t trust me with your daughter,” he said flatly. “I won’t hurt you. Don’t want to go out in the rain.”

She followed, hesitantly. He unlocked the door and went in. His saddlebags were sitting on the tiny wood table, and he swept it off by grabbing the strap and swinging it down to the floor beneath it, clearing the space between them. A quick sign lit the little stub of the candle, although the moonlight through the window lit the room fairly well.

“Sit,” he said. She sat across from him.

“So. What’s your name.”

“Elena,” she said. “My daughter is Annalise.”

“And she’s a sorceress.”

“Yes.”

“Are you?”

“No,” she said, startled. “Is that common?”

“Sometimes runs in families,” Geralt shrugged. “Sometimes not. Continue.”

“A woman came,” she said. “Said that she had—some sort of—a magical talent.”

“Chaos,” Geralt said. “Yeah.”

“She invited her to the magical school. Aretuza. It was—such an opportunity. My husband and I are farmers. Our parents were, too. To become a sorceress…”

Geralt nodded. “I get it.” This particular area wasn’t too superstitious. Being a sorcerer or sorceress wouldn’t make her daughter an anathema. It would certainly give her money, and accordingly some respect. A big step up for the daughter of farmers who made hardly enough to subsist.

“So I let her go,” she said. “She was fourteen. She came back three years later, angry. They’d—she was talented but not enough. Not enough. She didn’t graduate,” she added, unnecessarily.

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Of course, her father and I, we welcomed her home. And she did some work here. With her magic, as a cunning woman. But she quickly grew tired of minor ailments. Annalise wanted…they had told her that after Aretuza, it would mean a position at court. You have to understand…”

“I understand,” he said brusquely. “What’s this about the mirrors?”

“She was working on something,” Elena said. “Something that—she said it would make them pay attention. She had a workshop in town, and in the cellar she built—well. They call it a maze of mirrors. Really it’s—it’s a mirror, but through it you see—things. And some people, they seem to have been. Pulled through.”

“And your daughter?”

“I think she’s somewhere inside it,” she said. “Could you please…try and find her? See if she might be—they say it’s a monstrosity, or a trap, but it’s not really. She could be trapped too. She’s a good girl, really.”

“If I had a coin for every time I’d heard that,” Geralt muttered. “Alright. I’ll have a look. But if the sorcerer has it in hand, I’ll go.”

“Thank you,” she gasped. “Thank you.”

“I’m a Witcher,” he said. “We don’t work for free.” He glanced her up and down. Her daughter couldn’t have made much doing little spells for the village, and farmers could rarely afford to hire him without taking up a public collection for the area. Her clothes were well kept, but clearly old and cheap.

“Yes,” she said. She pulled out a pearl necklace. “This necklace is immune to my daughter’s magic.”

Geralt held it up. It didn’t make his medallion hum. “Hmm.”

“You’ll—it might help you, when you go down there,” she said. “And you can keep it. It’s real pearl.”

He examined the necklace. Nothing about it struck him as magical, but if it was a null device, it probably wouldn’t trip his magical medallion. And magical power or not, it did look like real pearl.

“Alright,” he said. “How should I hold it, then?”

“What?”

“To guard against Annalise’s magic.”

“Wear it?”

He hesitated. The chain on his medallion was specially forged, and he didn’t count on the thin thread of a pearl necklace to hold up in a real fight. He twisted it around his wrist instead, pushing it up his arm under the gauntlet. It went three times around his forearm.

“Alright,” he said, removing it again. “I’ll go in the morning.”

“The morning?”

“Unless she only comes out at night,” he looked at her.

“Oh, no! No. Morning is fine.”

“Where is the workshop?”

“Next to the butcher’s,” she said. “Turn left from the tavern door, and down the road. The windows are boarded up and there’s a guard. You’ll see it.”

“Alright,” he said. “I’ll let you know.”

“Thank you,” she said again, and left. As soon as the door was shut behind her, Geralt sighed heavily and bolted it.

More sorcerers. At least this time he’d been paid up front.

\---

The next morning he went straight to the workshop. The woman had been right about one thing, at least: it was easy to find. The guard at the door was less easy to charm.

“I’m a Witcher,” Geralt explained with as much patience as he could muster. “I was hired to look into it.”

“And the sorcerers have already sent someone,” the guard scowled. “Got orders not to let anyone else in.”

“The sorcerers hired me,” Geralt improvised. If it failed, he could always resort to knocking the man out, but the trouble with punching people was that they tended to wake back up angrier.

“Who?” the man asked, suspiciously.

Geralt should have asked Elena last night, he realized. Instead he said, “Yennefer of Vengerburg,” on a reflex. It was a stupid choice. She almost never associated with her former school, as far as Geralt knew.

By some quirk of fate, though, the man’s expression mostly cleared. “Well why didn’t you say? I don’t know why she wouldn’t have mentioned it.”

Wouldn’t have mentioned—great. So the sorcerer downstairs was Yennefer. If Elena had said that—well, Geralt might have gone payment or not. But of course he couldn’t let on to the guard that this was new information. “Does she mention anything?” Geralt said wryly, hoping that Yennefer had been as domineering and uncooperative as he had known her to be in the past.

The guard laughed. “True enough. Alright. Why’d a sorcerer need a Witcher, anyway?” he asked as he stepped aside.

“Don’t like to get their hands dirty,” Geralt tossed over his shoulder, and went down to the cellar.

There were torches lit—not many, but enough, considering the reflections of them lit the room quite thoroughly. He touched the medallion around his neck, which had begun to hum as soon as he took the last step from the narrow wooden stairs into the room. There was a single mirror in the center of the basement. One entrance—the stairs he’d taken. The cellar was entirely below ground. No windows, even up around the ceiling.

He walked in a careful circle around the mirror with the sword drawn. From the back it was just metal, the ordinary look of a standing mirror. From the front it looked entirely like the full-size looking glasses he’d seen in the bedrooms of a few sorceresses, except for the fact that his reflection within it refracted infinitely. It looked as though there was a second mirror behind him.

Geralt checked over his shoulder—there wasn’t. Feeling very foolish, he walked through the space with a hand out, as though he might walk into an invisible mirror that was somehow still contributing a reflection. He didn’t.

A shiver ran down his spine. He was profoundly out of his depth; he had no idea what sort of magic this was, and if there was a monster to kill at the end of this, it wasn’t the sort he was accustomed to fighting.

For a split second, as he turned back towards the mirror, Geralt considered leaving this to Yennefer, if it was indeed Yennefer who was here. Surely she was well-equipped to handle it?

But if she wasn’t…

He took a step towards the mirror, looking at his perfectly ordinary, infinitely refracting reflection. Then he caught the familiar scent of lilac and gooseberries.

It was the only sign Yennefer had been there, but she now wasn’t. And it hung in the air around the mirror.

If she was fine, she would be angry he interfered, he thought. Then he placed a hand against the glass.

For a fraction of a second, he felt nothing but that cool glass beneath his fingertips, and wondered if he’d have to turn back regardless. Then his fingers slipped through, the sensation like dipping his hand into cold water, and he shoved his way through the mirror’s surface shoulder-first before he had the chance to panic.

It was cold. That was the first thing he felt—that cold went through his whole body in a sudden shock, and he half-expected to feel wet. But on the other side he was dry, and warm again. The cold seemed to have passed as soon as he made it through the glass.

In the interior of the mirror—because that was what it had seemed to be, although now that Geralt thought about it more seriously, it was just as likely he’d stepped through some sort of portal—he could see moldy stone walls lit by torches. He seemed to be standing in a room that branched out into tunnels in all directions, all of them mildewed stone, all of them torch-lit.

Directly behind him was the mirror, except when he looked into it his reflected was utterly ordinary—no refraction whatsoever.

Geralt hesitated, then. He wasn’t sure which way to go, or what he was meant to do. He didn’t want to risk being lost in here, and he didn’t know which way Yennefer had gone, except—

\--except he still smelled her perfume in the air. It was stronger here, and when he focused on it he could smell it down one of the hallways, too.

He drew his sword, the one of iron, and made a mark on the wall. It stood out white against the dirty stone. He hadn’t brought breadcrumbs or pebbles like the children in that story; marks on the stone would have to do.

Down the hall he walked, marking whenever he made a turn, tracking the scent of Yennefer. It was comforting to have some sort of direction, even though the truth of it was that he didn’t know what he’d do when he got there.

The scent faded as he went, mingling with the scent of the mildew, and eventually he lost it entirely. It was odd—it should have gotten stronger as he got closer, not more displaced. It was as though the air moved differently in the tunnels. Still, he kept going, trusting he could follow the marks back.

Eventually he heard something, further down the tunnel. Someone was moving about. He quickened his steps and dropped against the wall, spending longer in the shadows between torches, trying to mute the sound of his boots on the stone.

But there was really nowhere to hide, and after it became louder as he approached, the sound quieted entirely. A few torches went out, further ahead.

It was strange—each time a torch went out, it went out in unison with another behind him. One-two. One-two.

A torch and its reflection.

Some small part of Geralt was fascinated. He wondered if there were halls mirrored the other way, halls he couldn’t see, where the torches were also going out. The larger part of Geralt was focused on the fact there was someone up ahead of him, who did not want to be seen.

“Hello,” he called, stopping a few meters back. He made another mark with his sword on the wall, just in case. “My name is Geralt. I’m a Witcher. Who are you?”

His eyes were very good, better than a human’s, and even though the person had put out most of the torches immediately around them, he could still make out the figure.

“Don’t move,” said Yennefer of Vengerburg. “Turn around. I want to get close and look at you?”

“Yen?”

“Turn around,” she commanded.

The smell of lilac and gooseberries hung in the air. Geralt touched the medallion again, but it hadn’t stopped humming the whole time he was in the mirrors, so it didn’t help.

He hesitated, and then turned. “Yen?”

“You look like you,” she said from behind him. “What in the name of Melitele are you doing here?”

“A woman in the town,” he said. “Asked that I…look into it. Seemed to think her daughter didn’t need to be killed or…whatever you were sent to do.”

“She killed herself,” Yennefer said. “She was dead when I came here. She had set this up as a trap, you see. It’s why they sent me, I suspect.”

“I had wondered,” Geralt said, after a moment.

“I had the nerve to be flattered,” Yennefer said. “That they would want my help. It figures.” She snorted. “But you look as you always have, Geralt, how is that?”

“It hasn’t been that long,” he said.

“In the mirrors,” she said impatiently. “How do you look as you always have?”

“Do you not?”

She saw him twitch. “I told you not to turn around!”

Through sheer force of will, he didn’t. “Her mother gave me a necklace. Said it was immune to her magic. Wasn’t so sure about that, but…”

“Useful,” she said. “A useful thing. And now, I supposed, you’re stuck here with me.”

“Stuck?” Geralt asked. “I marked a path back. If she’s dead, let’s go.”

“The tunnels haven’t moved around you?” Yennefer asked, skeptically. “The torches don’t flash and change?”

“No,” Geralt said. “Maybe it’s the necklace.”

“Maybe,” Yennefer said. “Maybe…”

“Did she leave anything?” Geralt asked. “A note?”

“As a matter of fact,” Yennefer said. “Don’t turn around. Open your hand.”

He opened the hand that did not hold the sword. She placed a slip of paper into it.

Geralt lifted it up and read it without difficulty in the remaining torchlight.

_You told me I should be ashamed. You should be ashamed. Here you are what you would least like to become, and each time you feel the shame of it, you will reflect more deeply on it._

“Hmm,” Geralt said. “Want to try and go back?”

She sighed. “Why not,” she said. “Lead the way.”

He walked, following the marks of his sword. He’d become uneasy when Yennefer mentioned the movement of the tunnels, but there was nothing that troubled him yet.

“How’d you find the girl?”

“Long dead. Rotted. The note beside her. I found other bodies, too,” she added. “Also dead. Trapped in here, I think. No magic killed them.”

“None thought to mark the way?” He couldn’t read her expressions this way, which meant that he was half-guessing what she was really thinking.

“I told you, the tunnels moved.”

“Haven’t moved around me yet.”

“Perhaps it’s your talisman.” Yennefer sighed. “I was inadequately prepared for this, I suppose. Foolish of me to accept the task at all.”

And then Geralt saw the torches flicker, a flash. “Wait.”

“What?” She saw the movement. “Oh, damn.”

“Why are they moving now?”

“Because we’re trying to leave?”

“Can they sense that?” Geralt asked. He didn’t put much above magic, really. Yennefer could read his thoughts easily enough.

She hummed something. She was doing something that Geralt couldn’t see. On reflex he turned to look, and she shouted, “Don’t turn around!” but it was too late.

For a second he didn’t realize what was wrong, and then she gave up on hiding her face and glared at him, and he could see.

It was Yennefer. He could tell it was Yennefer mostly because of her eyes. They were luminous and purple and exactly as always. It was the rest of her that had changed. Her skin was more sallow, her hair less smooth although still dark. More striking was the fact that her face was malformed, her jaw and cheek crooked, and one shoulder was lifted higher than the other. She stood hunched over; he doubted she could have stood straight.

“Are you happy now?” she asked, softly. “Happy now that you’ve seen what I am?”

There was another flicker as the tunnels shifted around them. Yennefer bowed in on herself more, ignoring it. “I don’t need to read your thoughts to know you are wondering who you slept with, what you—“

It was different to see it, of course, but Geralt had known who Yennefer had once been from the moment they met. It had lived in her beautiful eyes. He didn’t think she would like it if she knew that, either, more than she would like anything else about the situation.

She felt vulnerable. Nothing he could have thought would be kind enough. That was what this place wanted, wasn’t it? _Each time you feel the shame of it…_

The answer clicked into place, and Geralt reached forward and covered her mouth with his hand. “Your shame,” he said, “Is moving the tunnels.”

She had stopped speaking out of sheer shocked rage when he dared to touch her. Now understanding shifted on her features. “That little brat.”

“I’ll be happy once we get out of here,” Geralt said. “Do you still want to walk behind?”

“No,” Yennefer said. Her tone went cold. “I’m not ashamed.”

It might have been a lie, but there wasn’t a flicker, so Geralt assumed it was good enough for the spell.

They walked together, then. He stole sideways looks at her, although it was hard to know the difference between how she might have changed since they’d last met and how the spell of the reflected world had shifted her. She dressed in black and white as she always had. She had a new ring on her right hand, an agate set in silver.

For a few more turns Geralt’s markings held, and then all of a sudden they didn’t, broken off. “Damn,” he said.

“Now what?” she asked.

“Now…” Geralt searched the stone floor for footprints. Eventually he found the mark of a boot, and another mark on the wall, and they kept going.

“I’m surprised this place doesn’t work on you,” she said.

He shrugged. “That necklace.”

“May I see it?”

Warily, he went to unwind it. “Nevermind,” she said when she realized what he was doing. “Leave it on, if it’s working. I’ll have a look later.”

“How would it work? A talisman like this.”

“I don’t know,” Yennefer said. “I’ve never heard of something like that.”

“Hmm,” Geralt said. He hadn’t, either, which was why he hadn’t expected it to be real.

They made it a fair bit further in silence, before Geralt’s marks failed them again. This time he couldn’t find another mark, and he paced in circles, checking each tunnel, only daring to go so far from Yennefer before he doubled back, afraid that he wouldn’t be able to find her.

“Dammit,” she said, finally, when he’d returned for the third time. “I suppose we shall both be stuck here, then. Even worse.”

“Well,” Geralt said. “If I have to be trapped somewhere to die, there’s worse company.”

“Oh, really,” Yennefer began, angrily, and then stopped. “No, I don’t have the energy to be angry at you. But I wish you’d stop looking at me.”

“I like looking at you,” he said.

“Don’t mock me—“ she began, and then broke off when there was another flash of light.

“Damn!” She fell silent.

Geralt paced in a circle around the tunnels. They had changed, although he still couldn’t find a mark. “Do that again.”

“What?” Yennefer stared at him.

“Nevermind,” Geralt said. He felt foolish for a moment, as he tried to find the appropriate thought within him. The pieces of him that thought about himself as Geralt, as a person, tended to fade when he was on a job. Easy to lose it, in the hunt and the rhythm of doing what he was made to do.

But it was easier to find when he looked at Yennefer. Always closest to the surface, with Yen. “Smiled at a kid in the square yesterday and it scared them.”

Yennefer looked at him. The torches flickered. He did another round, checking for signs. Nothing.

“A Doppler turned into me in Novigrad and I didn’t recognize myself,” he said.

A flash. Geralt searched again, then shook his head, opened his mouth again—

“I gave up my ability to have children to stop looking like this and I’m ashamed I wouldn’t do it differently,” Yennefer said.

Another flash. He looked at her, nodded, and then searched. This time he found a mark, and they were able to continue down the tunnels.

“What a nightmare,” Yennefer said quietly, after they’d walked for a while. “Trapped in here, looking like everything I’d ever hated being. Do you want to know the worst part?”

“Not here,” Geralt said.

She paused, then nodded. “Have you been well?”

“Been alright,” he said. “Better for seeing you.”

“You don’t have to—“ she started to say, and then cut herself off. “Damn.”

“Not lying,” he said, guessing what she’d meant to say.

“I’ve missed you,” Geralt said. It was easier to say that than it was to say the things that turned the mirrors, the things he was practiced at not thinking about. “I saw you. Another sorceress showed me to you, in the water. Some kind of scrying.”

“What sorceress?”

“Coral.”

“Did you sleep with her?” Yennefer asked.

“Does it matter?” Geralt asked.

“I’m only curious.”

“Wouldn’t have, if you’d have had me,” he said, honestly.

She looked at him. “You left,” she said.

“You let me.”

“Could I have stopped you?”

“You can always stop me,” he admitted, and was spared from the rest of it when he saw the room with the mirror. “There.”

They reached the mirror. Geralt saw his own ordinary reflection, and beside him Yennefer as he’d always known her, composed and beautiful, standing tall with a face perfectly smooth. He wanted to take her hand, but didn’t, and she pushed through before he could say anything.

He followed. She had moved immediately out of the view of the mirror when she got free, and he followed her. “Should I smash it?”

“No,” she said. “They’ll send a mage to do it. Make a report.”

“Alright,” he said.

She pulled out a handheld mirror—he suspected she summoned it from somewhere, as he didn’t think the pocket she drew it from would fit it—and looked at her face. She turned away from him a little, and he took a moment to realize she was crying and trying to hide it.

“I hate that you saw that,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“What would you have seen?” she asked. “Without that necklace?”

He shrugged. “Don’t know. What was she saying—what you would least like to become?”

“Which is?”

“Don’t know.”

“Let’s look, shall we?”

He hesitated, then lifted his chin. His lip curled. “Why not?”

“Give me that necklace first.”

He took it off and gave it to her, and they went back. She stepped in front of it first while he hesitated in the doorway. Although she wore the pearls wrapped around her wrist, as he had, the woman in the mirror was still warped. Even from the entryway where he stood, Geralt could see that woman’s misshapen face, one shoulder lifted higher than the other, who stared back at beautiful Yennefer through the glass.

“Didn’t think so,” she said. “The pearls don’t work. Never did.”

Geralt sighed and came to join her. She had averted her eyes from the hunchback in the mirror, and looked at his reflection as soon as he passed into the mirror’s view. Geralt stared too. The man he faced in the glass stared back, his hair white, his sword peeking up over his shoulder, his golden cat-eyes looking coldly back. He lifted a shoulder in a shrug and dropped it, watching the other, identical man reflect the movement.

He laughed, suddenly. So did the man in the mirror, and the Witcher’s expression twisted to a glare for a split second before he turned and went.

“Oh,” Yennefer said. “I understand.” She strode quickly to catch up, resting a hand on his shoulder before he had made it halfway down the hall. He turned under her touch, instantly pliable. “I forget we sorcerers, at least, choose our shape. Do you hate it so much?”

He shrugged. “Don’t think too much about it.”

“What did you look like before?”

When he spoke, something about it felt fragile, like glass, or maybe glass shards he had to chew carefully to avoid slicing his mouth. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Before the mutagens.”

“I was a child.”

“A child who looked like what?” She stroked her thumb across his shoulder, gentle. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you to look.”

Geralt shrugged. Some part of him understood. She had felt vulnerable and had wanted him to show a weakness, too. “I had dark hair. Curls. Green eyes.”

“Can I see?”

“My memory’s not good,” he warned, but pushed the image towards her anyway, blurred as it was at the edges. He didn’t have a full picture of it, but he remembered the shock of looking in the mirror at his new eyes. Remembered his hair growing in white, the summer when it was half dark curls still, and how Vesemir had cut it on the dividing line where the pigment vanished as soon as the white reached past his chin.

He hadn’t realized what he’d see until he looked at himself. Wouldn’t have admitted it to himself, most of the time. He was a Witcher, was not born one but would die one. And if it made people look at him sideways in bars, avoid him on roads, refuse to sell to him in markets—if he sometimes flinched at the gold glint of his own yellow eyes—

“You looked so angry at your reflection, Geralt.”

He shrugged. “Witchers frighten people.” He’d even frightened the mother of this sorceress, last night.

“Frighten fools,” she says. “Frighten monsters. Or frighten men who know they’re close enough to qualify. It’s lucky you don’t let yourself think about it much. You hate yourself far more than I do, you’d have been trapped forever.”

He looked at her, and then grinned a little. “Witchers don’t have emotions. Lucky, that.”

She rolled her eyes. “Do you think you frighten me, Geralt?”

“No,” he said. “Of course not.”

“But you think I should be frightened?”

“No—“

“Fools,” she says “Cowards. Monsters. Your eyes look like amber. When I saw them reflecting in the dark back there and heard your voice, I was even a little glad for it. They reflect in the dark. Do you know what that’s called?”

“ _Tapetum lucidum_.”

She blinked. “Yes…how did you know that?”

She seemed to expect him to make a joke about being cleverer than she gave him credit for. His expression darkened instead. “That fucker Degerlund,” he said. “What happened last summer…we met. He threatened to cut it out.”

“Oh, that bastard,” she said with feeling. To his surprise she stepped close and put a hand on the crook of his arm and drew him closer. Taking that as the permission it appeared to be, he bowed his head and pressed his lips to her throat. “Were you the one who killed him?”

“Hmm.”

“Good,” she said softly. Her fingers reached up and combed through his white hair. “Geralt.”

“Hmm.”

“I’d change nothing about you.”

He drew back a little to speak. “Your eyes,” he said. “Are my favorite part of you.”

“My eyes,” she said. “Tell me, Geralt. Would you have loved me if we met when I was a hunchback?”

“Yes,” he said, unthinking. She pulled back and drew her hand back. For a second he thought she meant to hit him; then she froze. He realized by the slight unfocus of her eyes that she was still close enough to read his thoughts.

“You mean that,” she said, astonished. “Or you think you mean that, and I supposed that’s close enough.”

“I meant that,” he said.

“You don’t love me for my beauty?”

“You’re beautiful,” he admitted. “But you’re not only beautiful.”

“Well,” she said. Her eyes went soft. She stepped close in and kissd him. “I suppose I owe you.”

“You got my swords back,” he said. “Thanks for that. We’re more than even.”

“And you left those gems with Nenneke for me,” she said. “Yes, I spoke to her. I had half deposited into a bank for you, in Temeria. I didn’t pay full price for the swords, so it’s only fair. I kept the half, because you did owe me then, and it’s rude to refuse a gift. And the agate.”

“I saw,” he admitted. “It looks well on you.”

She looked down at the ring for a moment. “Yes,” she said. “It does. Well. This basement is dismal. Let’s go.”

Geralt followed her up the stairs. Looking at her softened the blow of the plans he was already making in his head, to tell the sorceress’s mother she was already dead, to head out of town tomorrow.

“Where are you headed?” she asked him. “After your business is done here.”

He shrugged. “Don’t know yet.” He’d planned to begin to take a circuitous route north, but he’d follow the tales of monsters, unless…

“I’m riding for Thanedd tomorrow,” she said. “From there I’ll return to Vengerburg. If the way suits you.”

He looked at her, at those eyes, the eyes of a hunchback, the eyes of the woman he loved. “It suits me very well.”

**Author's Note:**

> EDIT: And I can reveal myself! It was a pleasure to write my first Witcher fic for this exchange.
> 
> If you can, please leave a comment--they mean a lot.
> 
> I'm [catalists](http://catalists.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr or [@chromecatalists](https://twitter.com/chromecatalists/) on Twitter.


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